AWS re:Invent announcements: What’s changing this year

The sheer number of AWS re:Invent announcements is overwhelming:

Number of announcements per day at AWS re:Invent 2018 (Source: Mark Nunnikhoven) 

To break up the 147 AWS announcements, we grouped them by day of release.

AWS re:Invent Announcements: Day One 

• • Elastic File System Infrequent Access Storage Class for cost-effectively storing and accessing all files in a file system, eliminating the need to manage data to control costs 

• • Amazon EBS Doubles the Maximum Performance of Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) Volumes for running applications requiring high performance storage, such as large transactional databases, big data analytics, and log processing applications 

• • S3 Intelligent-Tiering — a New Amazon S3 Storage Class for customers who want to optimize storage costs automatically when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead 

• • S3 Batch Operations for object management  

Learn about availability vs. durability on AWS S3

• • AWS DataSync for simplifying, automating, and accelerating online data transfer 

• • AWS Transfer for SFTP for transferring files directly in and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol  

• • Key Management Service (KMS) custom key store feature for more stringent user control over key management 

• • AWS Global Accelerator for routing traffic to multiple regions, improving availability and performance for end users 

• • Transit Gateway for connecting virtual private clouds and on-premise networks 

Read our breakdown of AWS Transit Gateway

• • AWS Private Marketplace for IT admins to pre-approve software products that meet their company’s policies 

• • New EC2 P3dn and C5n instances for high-performance cloud apps 

• • RoboMaker for developers to develop, test, and deploy robotics applications, as well as to build intelligent robotics functions using the cloud 

• • AWS IoT SiteWise for collecting, structuring, labeling and searching data from industrial equipment   

• • AWS IoT Events for detecting and responding to events from IoT sensors  

• • AWS IoT Things Graph to build new IoT applications through visual, no-code tooling 

• • AWS IoT Greengrass Connectors for connecting AWS IoT Greengrass devices to third-party applications, the cloud, and each other  

• • Amplify Console, for hosting modern web applications with serverless backends  

See how our AWS consulting can help you stay on top of changes

• • Compute Optimized option for Snowball Edge for running compute-intensive applications in physically harsh or offline locations
  • Firecracker Open Source Technology for creating microVMs  

AWS re:Invent Announcements: Day Two

• • AWS Inferentia for delivering high performance at low cost on a machine learning inference chip 

• • AWS-Optimized TensorFlow for developers to quickly and easily get started with deep learning in the cloud 

• • AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning for fast access to the best AI algorithms and pretrained models 

• • Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth for building highly accurate datasets and reducing labeling costs by up to 70% 

• • Amazon SageMaker RL for machine learning development and training pipelines 

• • Amazon Elastic Inference for GPU-powered deep learning inference acceleration 

• • Amazon SageMaker Neo for accelerating AI inferencing automatically to disparate edge devices 

• • Amazon Personalize for using AI to generate real-time recommendations in cloud applications 

• • Amazon Forecast for automating delivery of AI-generated time-series forecasting into cloud applications 

• • Amazon Textract for performing high-volume AI-driven OCR on any document in the cloud 

• • Amazon Comprehend Medical for extracting medical data quickly from any document 

• • AWS DeepRacer for encouraging the development of RL-based robotics for autonomous edge devices 

• • Amazon FSx family for managing diverse file systems in the cloud 

• • AWS Lake Formation for simplifying and accelerating data lake setup 

• • Amazon Aurora Global Database for running a robust, high-performance global relational database in the cloud 

• • DynamoDB On-Demand for managing a global key-value database cost effectively and with transactional guarantees 

• • DynamoDB Transactions for developers to easily build transactional guarantees of full atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability into multi-item updates in DynamoDB applications 

• • Amazon S3 Batch Operations for automating bulk cloud storage management 

• • Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive for archiving data securely and inexpensively in the cloud 

• • Amazon Timestream for performing low-latency streaming time-series and event data analytics in the cloud 

• • Amazon Quantum Ledger Database for running an append-only immutable hyperledger distributed database 

• • AWS Managed Blockchain for quickly creating and managing scalable blockchain networks 

• • AWS Outposts for managing cloud-native services transparently across hybrid clouds 

• • AWS Control Tower for managing multiple cloud accounts from a single location 

• AWS Security Hub for centralizing cloud security 

AWS re:Invent Announcements: Day Three

• • Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka for running applications on Apache Kafka in the AWS Cloud without needing Apache Kafka infrastructure management expertise 

• • AWS Toolkits for PyCharm, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio Code 

• • Lambda Layers and the Lambda Runtime AP for using any programming language and sharing common components  

• • Lambda functions as targets for Application Load Balancers 

• • Compute, Database, Messaging, Analytics, and Machine Learning Integration for AWS Step Functions 

• • Application integration with AWS Cloud Map for service discovery 

• • AWS App Mesh for microservices on AWS 

• • New Amazon SageMaker Search Capability for accelerating machine learning experimentation 

• Amazon SageMaker notebooks now support Git integration for increased collaboration and version control

While no one can say AWS is short on cloud tools, they’ve given us a lot to digest.  

If you’re wondering how to incorporate any of the AWS re:Invent news into your business, feel free to send us a note. We’d be happy to throw some ideas around together with your team.

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P.S. We’ll be covering a few of these AWS announcements in more detail – particularly those related to SageMaker, IoT, Lambda, and microservices – as they’ve garnered a great amount of interest within our community. Stay tuned!